“Had not my indisposition hindered my attendance at Court, I should in one of the first places waited upon you to give humble thanks for your extended favour upon my letter, in taking bail for Captain Foster’s servant; and I hope his Honour is now satisfied so well at the sessions, as not to detain him any longer, in whose behalf, had I thought him in the least guilty, I should rather have suffered myself than have appeared for him; but my six years’ experience of him during my imprisonment in the Tower, made me confident, and if you please now to crown your favour to me by his despatch, it shall be, ere long, most thankfully acknowledged by me, who do not long for any one reason more to be at Court, and haste thither, than to be an eye-witness of so bright a star showing there; and that I may have occasion to appear “Your Honour’s “most humble and obliged servant, “WORCESTER.[F] “December 13th, 1662. “For the Right Honourable Sir Henry Bennett, One of his Majesty’s principal Secretaries of State, these.” We learn from the latter communication that he was in attendance at Court, though at the time, through indisposition, obliged to discontinue. His expression--“my six years’ experience of him, during my imprisonment in the Tower,” will bear two or three constructions, unless certain particulars are well noted. He may be considered to have been a state prisoner from July 1652, to May 1660. But he may have been confined in the Tower only from July 1652, until 5th of October 1654, when an order passed for his liberation on bail, but yet virtually a prisoner. As we have for the longest period the term of nearly eight years, the preceding “six years” acquaintance may have commenced only shortly before his discharge on bail, which appears to be the most reasonable construction, as he is not speaking of the precise term of his own imprisonment but of that of his “experience of him _during_ my imprisonment.” From the time of his enlargement to the termination of the Protectorate was five years and seven months, still leaving five months to accomplish the acquaintance within the precincts of the prison, and which he might fairly date to the period of Charles the Second’s accession, as the full term of his “imprisonment,” whether within or without its precise locality; for he was certainly not at liberty, like any other subject of the Commonwealth, to leave the kingdom. It has generally, however, been supposed that he suffered many years of absolute close confinement, and most romantic fictions have grown out of the interesting fable of a philosopher incarcerated in some dungeon-like chambers within the Tower, experimenting on culinary vessels, led by the explosion of a pot-lid to study the nature of steam, thereon applying his great discovery to practice, and forthwith writing a book, a true picture of science struggling under the most excruciating difficulties. The fable lost nothing of interest